Seth Kinast

I am the Technical Lead for Marketplace Interfaces. My team owns the Facebook Marketplace experience across desktop web, mobile web, and Facebook Lite. We work to offer a Marketplace experience that's specifically tailored to the unique needs of each of these platforms. As lead, I work to help set our team roadmap, prioritize projects, unblock the team, and coordinate cross-functionally to ensure everyone's success. Facebook Marketplace is the largest C2C marketplace in the United States, used by over one-third of the US and by over 800 million people worldwide.

CogDev is my personal company which I have operated informally for many years before registering it as a business several years ago. I have completed many freelance projects using a wide variety of languages and skillsets, from PHP and MySQL to talking to hardware using Python APIs. As a solo freelancer, I am responsible for not only front- and backend development, but also for "softer" areas of project management such as requirements-gathering and customer support. In addition to projects for companies, I also maintain a personal project under the Cognitive Development name as a breeding ground and testbed for new ideas I'd like to try out. At its peak, this project received over 10 million page views and around 26,000 unique visitors monthly.

I work on the Web Core team, which owns and curates many of the core components of desktop web at Facebook. Web Core's goal is to make using Facebook on desktop computers a great experience. We partner with other teams to work on web-specific projects in those teams' domain, lending our UI-focused experience and product knowledge. I am responsible for growth opportunities within Web Core. I work on projects to make it easier to create and access your account and to make you interested in returning.

While my title changed, my responsibilities remain mainly the same. I work on LinkedIn search for both mobile-web and desktop, and act as a technical lead for Search. I collaborate with other teams as well as business counterparts to help integrate search into products across the LinkedIn portfolio. I also serve on one of the Hiring Committees to evaluate potential candidates for engineering positions at LinkedIn.

Building LinkedIn Search to help people connect with talent opportunities. I am the Lead webdev on Search. I work to prioritize projects for my team, act as a liaison to other teams in the organization, and serve as a mentor and resource for my Search webdevs.

Set standards and best practices for UI development, and champion beautiful UI and thoughtful UX. I am responsible for developing a UI specification for the Amazon Webstore themes platform. While at Amazon, my primary development focus has been on a new Webstore platform built with Node.js, with about equal time spent working on backend Node services and crafting frontend UI. I am the only UI developer for my team, and handle all front-end development. Our work with Node.js allowed us to create a platform with drastically faster response times, lower latency, and higher throughput as compared to the legacy Java-based system. As one of the first teams at Amazon to utilize Node, we also spent a significant amount of time developing custom solutions to integrate Node with Amazon's build and deployment systems.

I rearchitected a significant core component of Cobalt’s content management system, allowing for “freeform” placement of website elements in an easy, drag-and-drop manner. This system directly contributed to over $2 million in new and renewed contracts and fundamentally altered the direction of Cobalt’s flagship product. I initiated the transition to modern front-end development practices for Volkswagen, one of Cobalt’s largest clients. In my efforts to modernize sites to use clean, semantic HTML5 and cutting-edge CSS3, I reduced page load times by up to 80% on Volkswagen sites. I developed over fifteen self-contained webapps (“widgets”) using Velocity, HTML5/CSS3, and object-oriented Javascript. Using these widgets as a base, multiple variants were easily created using OOP principles, without forking or reusing code. I represented over 75 front-end developers as an ongoing member of a Cobalt user interface team tasked with standardizing and recommending UI best practices.

Tasked with creating the user interface for a new online forum hosting software from the ground up, I designed wireframes and created workflows to provide guidelines for the visual design team. I then transformed final designer comps into standards-compliant HTML and CSS, while providing usability feedback and following best practices for user interaction. After successfully delivering a complete product, I shifted focus to platform enhancements and developed a custom library on top of jQuery to allow users to modify their hosted forums without knowledge of Javascript or HTML.